Event Details

Speaker: Professor Gerry Stoker, University of Southampton
Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this

Event Details

Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this seminar Gerry Stoker explains how and why anti-political sentiment has grown among British citizens over the last half-century drawing on research about to be published in a Cambridge University Press book co-authored with Nick Clarke, Will Jennings and Jonathan Moss. The book offers a range of conceptual developments to help explore how citizens think about politics and the issue of negativity towards politics and uses responses to public opinion surveys alongside a unique data source-the diaries, reports and letters collected by Mass Observation. The book reveals that anti-politics has grown in scope and intensity when seen through the lens of a long view of the issue stretching back over multiple decades. Such growth is explained by citizens’ changing images of ‘the good politician’ and changing modes of political interaction between politicians and citizens. The seminar will conclude by placing these findings in a broader comparative context and exploring the implications for efforts to reform and improve democratic politics.

Chair: Dr Thomas Wynter

Discussant: Professor Ariadne Vromen

Time

(Tuesday) 11:45 am - 1:30 pm

Location

Room 276

Merewether Building, University of Sydney http://sydney.edu.au/arts/about/maps.shtml?locationID=[[H04]]

Event Details

Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against

Event Details

Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in northern Rakhine State causing more than 650,000 Rohingyas to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous “war on drugs” has claimed more than 12,000 victims, predominantly the urban poor, including children. And the Cambodian government’s broad political crackdown in 2017 targeting the political opposition, independent media and human rights groups has effectively extinguished the country’s flickering democratic system at the expense of basic rights.

Australia’s 2017 White Paper includes the goals of “promoting an open, inclusive and prosperous Indo–Pacific region in which the rights of all states are respected” as well as the need to protect and promote the international rules based order. So what role does Australia play in addressing these problems and what more could the Australian government be doing?

To discuss these matters, we are delighted to welcome Elaine Pearson.

Elaine Pearson is the Australia Director at Human Rights Watch. Based in Sydney, she works to influence Australian foreign and domestic policies in order to give them a human rights dimension. She regularly briefs journalists, politicians and government officials, appears on television and radio programs, testifies before parliamentary committees and speaks at public events. She is an adjunct lecturer in law at the University of New South Wales. From 2007 to 2012 she was the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division based in New York.

Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Elaine worked for the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kathmandu and London. She is an expert on migration and human trafficking issues and sits on the board of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. Pearson holds degrees in law and arts from Australia’s Murdoch University and obtained her Master’s degree in public policy at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

She writes frequently for publications including Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal.

Event Details

Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way

Event Details

Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way they emerge out of ecclesiastical institutions and practices. However, I will suggest that Foucault’s contribution to political theology in a sense turns the paradigm on its head and signals a radical departure from the Schmittian model.

Foucault does not seek to sanctify power and authority in modernity, but rather to disrupt their functioning and consistency by identifying their hidden origins, unmasking their contingency and indeterminacy, and bringing before our gaze historical alternatives. Furthermore, Foucault introduces to the debate around political theology something that was entirely missing from it – the idea of the subject. The notion of the ‘confessing subject’ – the individual who, from earliest Christian times, has been taught to confess his secrets and thus form a truth about himself – is central to Foucault’s concerns, as are the ethical strategies through which the subject might constitute himself in alternative ways that allow a greater degree of autonomy. And while in the past, religious institutions and practices, particularly the Christian pastorate, have sought to render the subject obedient and governable, at other times, including in modernity, religious ideas have been a source of disobedience, revolt and what Foucault calls ‘counter-conducts’. It is here that I will develop the idea of ‘political spirituality’, showing how this notion can operate as a radical counter-point to political theology.

About the speaker:

Saul Newman is Professor of Political Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London and currently a Visiting Professor at the Sydney Democracy Network. His research is in continental political thought and contemporary political theory. Mostly known for his research on postanarchism, he also works on questions of sovereignty, human rights, as well as on the thought of the nineteenth century German individualist anarchist, Max Stirner. His most recent work is on political theology and post-secular politics, and he has a new book forthcoming with Polity called Political Theology: a Critical Introduction.

Time

(Thursday) 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Location

Seminar Room 498

Merewether Building, University of Sydney

Organizer

Department of Government and International Relationsmadeleine.pill@sydney.edu.au

Event Details

A closer look at the way politics has changed
Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two

Event Details

A closer look at the way politics has changed

Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two leading scholars to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Authoritarian populist parties have gained votes and seats in many countries, and entered government in states as diverse as Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland. Across Europe, their average share of the vote in parliamentary elections remains limited but it has more than doubled since the 1960s and their share of seats tripled. Even small parties can still exert tremendous ‘blackmail’ pressure on governments and change the policy agenda, as demonstrated by UKIP’s role in catalyzing Brexit.

The danger is that populism undermines public confidence in the legitimacy of liberal democracy while authoritarianism actively corrodes its principles and practices. It also increases the resolve of authoritarian regimes around the world. This public forum sets out to explain the growth and character of these regimes and the polarisation over the cultural cleavage dividing social liberals and social conservatives in the electorates, and how these differences of values translate into support for authoritarian-populist parties and leaders in the U.S. and Europe, and elsewhere. The forum highlights the dangers to liberal democracy arising from these developments and what could be done to mitigate the risks.

This event brings together Professor Pippa Norris and Professor John Keane to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Professor Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Professor John Keane will discuss his new book When trees fall, monkeys scatter.

The Speakers:

Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Pippa is a comparative political scientist who has taught at Harvard for more than a quarter century. She is ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, the Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and Director of the Electoral Integrity Project. Her research compares public opinion and elections, political institutions and cultures, gender politics, and political communications in many countries worldwide. She is ranked the 4th most cited political scientist worldwide, according to Google scholar. Major honors include, amongst others, the Skytte prize, the Karl Deutsch award, and the Sir Isaiah Berlin award. Her current work focuses on a major research project, www.electoralintegrityproject.com, established in 2012 and also a new book with Ronald Inglehart “Cultural Backlash” analyzing support for populist-authoritarianism.

John Keane will discuss his new book When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: rethinking democracy in China. He is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), and Distinguished Professor at Peking University. He is renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy. He is the Director and co-founder of the Sydney Democracy Network. He has contributed to The New York Times, Al Jazeera, the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Harper’s, the South China Morning Post and The Huffington Post. His online column ‘Democracy field notes’ appears regularly in the London, Cambridge- and Melbourne­-based The Conversation. Among his best-known books are the best-selling Tom Paine: A political life (1995), Violence and Democracy (2004), Democracy and MediaDecadence (2013) and the highly acclaimed full-scale history of democracy, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009). His most recent books are A Short History of the Future of Elections (2016) and When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter (2017), and he is now completing a new book on the global spread of despotism.

Event Details

Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand and leader of the United Nations Development Program
With Tanya Plibersek
Helen Clark served as Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1999 to 2008,

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Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand and leader of the United Nations Development Program

With Tanya Plibersek

Helen Clark served as Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1999 to 2008, and from April 2009 to April 2017 she was the first woman to lead the United Nations Development Program.

Clark was the second woman to serve as Prime Minister of New Zealand, and the first to have won office at an election. During her period in office, other women also held many prominent elected and appointed offices in New Zealand. As a female head of government, Clark was a member of the Council of Women World Leaders.

In 2009, she resigned from parliament to take up the post of Administrator of the United Nations Development Program. She worked to reform the administration and bureaucracy of the UNDP, putting an emphasis on greater transparency in the organisation.

While holding the office as administrator for UNDP, Forbes magazine ranked her the 22nd most powerful woman in the world in 2016. In that year, she also stood for election for Secretary General for the United Nations.

The Jessie Street Lunch has been held annually since April, 1989, the centenary of Jessie Street’s birth. It is always held at the NSW Parliament House in Sydney. The lunch is an inspiring platform for discussion of the social justice issues that were dear to Jessie’s heart and for which she fought: the rights of women and indigenous Australians, peace, and an end to all forms of discrimination.

This year will see the 70th anniversary of the adoption and proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 2018. Australia was among the leading countries in developing and urging the adoption, and Dr Evatt presided over the occasion as the President of the General Assembly, the highest position in international affairs ever attained by an Australian. Jessie Street and the Commission on the Status of Women helped ensure there was provision for equal pay regardless of sex (Article 23(2)), equal rights in marriage and divorce, and social security protection for widows (Article 25).

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Exploring environmental art and its impact in the Anthropocene
What is the role of environmental art today, and what does it take to create it? How can art

Event Details

Exploring environmental art and its impact in the Anthropocene

What is the role of environmental art today, and what does it take to create it? How can art raise awareness of the environmental crisis, and in what ways does it inspire action? And most importantly, if environmental art is not solely representational––representing nature, for instance––then what can it be? This workshop aims to consider these questions in light of the major public art of collaborative artists, Jennifer Turpin and Michaelie Crawford.

By investigating the site-specific, restorative, and educational works of Turpin + Crawford, this workshop will explore the meaning of artistic collaboration on a number of levels––between the two artists, between artists and engineers, and between art and nature. What model does this collaboration serve for future inter-disciplinary work between the arts and the sciences? In what ways can non-representational environmental art “collaborate” with the natural world? And how can such a collaboration invite environmental awareness and action?

Films by Colin McPhee, Jane Belo, Miguel Covarrubias, Gregory Bateson, and Rolf de Maré with Claire Holt document a time when both male and female roles were performed by men and boys in all dance-dramas. With the exception of one genre that originated in 1880, girls and women danced for religious rituals as well as a solo form performed for entertaining guests within some palaces and surrounding communities. But even these female dance roles were very popular as performed by boys.

Beginning in the 1920s, women and girl dancers began to replace many of the men, taking on both female and many male dramatic roles. And an androgynous style emerged that combined male and female qualities. With unprecedented film footage from the 1930s we will see boys and men performing female and androgynous roles, females performing for rituals and young women performing female and male roles.

Drawing on extensive field research amongst Bali’s centenarian artists, ​this film screening and lecture demonstrates how the process of musical and cultural repatriation can lead in unpredictable and illuminating directions.

About the Speaker

Ethnomusicologist Edward Herbst is the Director of the Bali 1928 Repatriation Project and author of acclaimed book, Voices in Bali: Energies and Perceptions in Vocal Music and Dance Theatre. Find out more about Bali 1928 here.

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Scientists collect data and from it create information about the world, which is of great value to society, but not necessarily reflected in policymaking and political action. The failure of

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Scientists collect data and from it create information about the world, which is of great value to society, but not necessarily reflected in policymaking and political action. The failure of society to act on anthropogenic-driven climate change is the prime example.

This gap between information and action can be bridged by the humanities, in particular the arts. Artworks create links between field observations, such as climate records, through the visualizations of the effects of climate change up to artistic direct interventions in earth systems.

Artists are now coming together to work on climate change, to deploy research methods that inform art, while at the same time creating empathy for the planet place by place, species by species. These practices build the bridge from information to action – a cultural intervention without which we risk our own survival.

In this Sydney Ideas forum William L. Fox, Director of the Centre for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada, whose extensive practice as a curator, writer and commentator crosses the arts and sciences, will address the claim that in this moment of planetary environmental crisis, artists have never been more important.

Speakers

Chair

Dr Killian Quigley, Postdoctoral Fellow, Sydney Environment Institute

Biographies

William (Bill) L. Foxis Director of the Center for Art and Environment at the Nevada of Museum of Art; a writer whose work is a sustained inquiry into how human cognition transforms land into landscape. He has published poems, articles, reviews, and essays in more than seventy magazines, has had fifteen collections of poetry published in three countries, and has written eleven nonfiction books about the relationships among art, cognition, and landscape.

Janet Laurence is a Sydney-based Australian artist who exhibits nationally and internationally. Her practice examines our physical, cultural and conflicting relationship to the natural world. She creates immersive environments that navigate the interconnections between organic elements and systems of nature. Within the recognised threat to so much of the life world, she explores what it might mean to heal, albeit metaphorically, the natural environment, fusing this with a sense of communal loss and search for connection with powerful life-forces. Her work is included in museum, university, corporate and private collections as well as within architectural and landscaped public places.

Institution/Awards: Laurence has been a recipient of Rockefeller, Churchill and Australia Council fellowships; recipient of the Alumni Award for Arts, UNSW; visiting fellow at the NSW University Art and Design; Australian representative for the COP21/FIAC, Artists 4 Paris Climate 2015 exhibition; visiting fellow of the 2016/2017 Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) foundation fellowship; and artist in residence at the Australian Museum.

Ian Maxwell is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts School of Drama, where he majored in Directing, Ian is now Chair of the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies. Subsequent to that training, he embarked upon academic work at the University of Sydney, where he completed his PhD, an ethnography of Hip Hop culture in the suburbs of Sydney in the 1990s in 1997. He has published extensively on a range of topics, including his 2003 book, “Phat Beats, Dope Rhymes”: Hip Hop Down Under Comin’ Upper (Wesleyan), chapters in several collections and a number of journals. In 2008 he was awarded the Marlis Thiersch Prize for research excellence in an English-language article published anywhere in the world in the broad field of theatre and performance studies for his essay on Victor Turner. In 2017, Ian directed Prince Bettliegend as part of the Out of the Shadows festival, a cabaret/revue devised and first performed by citizens of the ghetto at Terezin, Czechoslovakia.

Killian Quigley is postdoctoral research fellow at the Sydney Environment Institute. He completed his PhD in English at Vanderbilt University in 2016. He is co-editing, with Margaret Cohen, Senses of the Submarine: A Cultural History of the Undersea. Killian’s writings have appeared recently in MAKE, Eighteenth-Century Life, The Eighteenth Century, the newsletter of the Australian Coral Reef Society, and SEI’s blog. He convenes the Reading Environments group at the University of Sydney, and is at work on a poetic and aesthetic history of the ocean entitled Seascape and the Submarine.

Event Details

The development of satellite technology to enhance the exploration and use of outer
space has continued at a rapid rate ever since the space age began

Event Details

The development of satellite technology to enhance the exploration and use of outer

space has continued at a rapid rate ever since the space age began in 1957. Satellites play a vital part of many aspects of daily life.

Satellites are also central to the conduct of armed conflict. Most military leaders regard space-related technology as an integral element of their strategic battle platform. This reflects the changing technological nature of armed conflict, which challenges many aspects of international law, including the regulation of warfare. This is particularly the case with respect to the use of satellite technology. Moreover, the continuing development of this technology challenges the core of the ‘peaceful purposes’ doctrine that underpins the international regulation of outer space.

In this talk, our speaker, Steve Freeland, will reflect on the legal frameworks that might apply to the use of outer space during armed conflict and offer some thoughts about what is required to properly address the issue.

Steven Freeland is Dean of the School of Law and Professor of International Law at Western Sydney University, where he specializes in International Criminal Law, Commercial Aspects of Space Law, Public International Law and Human Rights Law. He is also Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna; Permanent Visiting Professor at the iCourts, the Danish Centre of Excellence for International Courts, University of Copenhagen; Member of Faculty at the London Institute of Space Policy and Law; Visiting Professor at Université Toulouse 1 Capitole; Adjunct Professor at the University of Adelaide; Associate Member at the Centre for Research in Air and Space Law, McGill University; and a former Marie Curie Fellow (2013-2014). He has been an expert assessor for government research councils in Australia, Canada, The Netherlands, South Africa, and Hong Kong, and has taught at universities in over 20 countries.

Event Details

When today’s tech giants burst into Silicon Valley, we welcomed them as new blood disrupting the old-school media oligarchy.
These new kids on the block – Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple – have since gone on to become

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When today’s tech giants burst into Silicon Valley, we welcomed them as new blood disrupting the old-school media oligarchy.

These new kids on the block – Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple – have since gone on to become the most powerful media monopolies we’ve ever seen.

We have, perhaps unwittingly, granted them this status. We’ve handed the tech giants great power, international influence and all our personal data. They don’t pay for it, yet sell it to organisations who will. They’ve even bounced off attempt after attempt for regulation and tax restrictions proving they’re more powerful than governments and nation states.

As annoying as that may be, it’s hard to imagine conscientiously excluding them from our lives. It’s near impossible to not use some combination of them thanks to the conveniences they offer us.

The tech giants have changed the way we live. They shape the way we communicate with each other, our economy and even the last US election and democracy itself. They’ve torn down industries and given birth to entirely new ones.

Have we given them too much influence?

Speakers

FOR

Amanda Brown, formerly of The Go-Betweens, is a composer, musician, and director. She is an ambassador of APRA ACMOS, the licencing and royalties body that represents music artists, and is passionate about fair pay for creative producers. Amanda believes the success of the tech giants is due to the work of content creators they don’t fairly reward.

John McDuling covered Silicon Valley as a journalist for Quartz in New York and now writes about business, technology, and finance for the Sydney Morning Herald. For him, the tech giants want nothing less than every slice of the market pie. He says their product is addiction, so let’s look up from our screens before it’s too late.Follow John:@jmcduling

AGAINST

Alan Jones is an angel investor who builds startups. His official title at BlueChilli is ‘entrepreneur in residence’. The founding investor of Startmate and Blackbird Ventures also works in KPMG’s High Growth Ventures team. Previously, Alan was the South Asia product director of Yahoo!. He sees the value of tech companies great, small, established and fresh. Follow Alan:@bigyahu

Claire Reilly is senior editor at CNET, a website covering all things tech and digital. She produces written and video work on everything from smartphones to telco infrastructure. Claire says we can demand better standards from the tech giants, as consumers we have the power to positively influence them, and talk of tearing them down denies their positive impacts. Follow Claire:@reillystyley

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Environmental crisis is the prevailing condition of the present, but making art about it is notoriously hard. For starters, it often defies representation: many of the most significant

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Environmental crisis is the prevailing condition of the present, but making art about it is notoriously hard. For starters, it often defies representation: many of the most significant changes wrought by, for instance, climate change – ocean acidification, say – do not lend themselves readily to visualization or narration. And for that matter, mainstream approaches to narrative and aesthetics may simply not do: to think, for example, with the massive scale of geological change, or the minute one of chemical composition, might require entirely new subjects, stories, and forms. Part of what’s at stake, surely, is that mainstream – dominant cultural traditions may need rejigging, or discarding, to make the requisite innovation possible. And there’s a serious risk, furthermore, of appearing to instrumentalise art, to reduce it to a means to an end.

This symposium invites artists and critics to reflect on these and other challenges, and to describe the strategies – and struggles – they evoke. Practitioners and scholars in various media, and from diverse traditions, will talk across boundaries to address common issues, and to inspire novel methods. On the field of making, theory and action intersect. Environment in Practice attends to those intersections, and their consequences for the futures of art, and of earth.

Event Details

Dear Sociology & Social Policy Dept students,
The Departmental staff welcome you warmly to a BBQ on Wednesday 28 March, 12-2pm to be held at Manning House BBQ near the tennis

Event Details

Dear Sociology & Social Policy Dept students,

The Departmental staff welcome you warmly to a BBQ on Wednesday 28 March, 12-2pm to be held at Manning House BBQ near the tennis court.

Please RSVP to this call and come along to meet your fellow students, and staff who you can get to know better, as well as discuss senior unit options in Sociology, Social Policy, Criminology, and Socio-Legal Studies.

RSVP is due on 18 March 2018. If you have any dietary requirements, please specify when registering.

Event Details

The idea of unconditional basic income occupies a peculiar place on the political and ideological landscape. Versions of UBI are being defended both by left-wing progressives like Guy Standing and

Event Details

The idea of unconditional basic income occupies a peculiar place on the political and ideological landscape. Versions of UBI are being defended both by left-wing progressives like Guy Standing and by right-wing libertarians like Charles Murray. Both versions share a common idea: means-tested, targeted income transfer programs are replaced by an unconditional basic income given to all. Where they differ is in how generous is the proposed basic income, what range of programs would be eliminated when a UBI is introduced, and who precisely will be eligible for the UBI.

This talk will make four interconnected arguments in defense of the expansive, progressive version of Unconditional Basic Income: (1) An expansive UBI fits into a broader, long-term project of emancipatory social transformation. (2) It is economically feasible within contemporary capitalist economies; the obstacles to a progressive UBI are primarily political, not economic. (3) Even though an expansive UBI can contribute to the long-run erosion of the dominance of capitalism, it also can help solve certain immediate problems internal to a capitalist economy. This is what makes it a potentially achievable reform. (4) It is therefore worthwhile putting the progressive UBI on the political agenda of the left and struggling to discredit the neoliberal version.

2 weeks agoby sydneydemocracyProfessor Baogang He, Alfred Deakin Professor, Chair in International Relations, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts & Education, Deakin University and Professor John Keane interrogate authoritarianism and democracy at ACRI UTS

Event Details

A closer look at the way politics has changed
Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two

Event Details

A closer look at the way politics has changed

Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two leading scholars to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Authoritarian populist parties have gained votes and seats in many countries, and entered government in states as diverse as Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland. Across Europe, their average share of the vote in parliamentary elections remains limited but it has more than doubled since the 1960s and their share of seats tripled. Even small parties can still exert tremendous ‘blackmail’ pressure on governments and change the policy agenda, as demonstrated by UKIP’s role in catalyzing Brexit.

The danger is that populism undermines public confidence in the legitimacy of liberal democracy while authoritarianism actively corrodes its principles and practices. It also increases the resolve of authoritarian regimes around the world. This public forum sets out to explain the growth and character of these regimes and the polarisation over the cultural cleavage dividing social liberals and social conservatives in the electorates, and how these differences of values translate into support for authoritarian-populist parties and leaders in the U.S. and Europe, and elsewhere. The forum highlights the dangers to liberal democracy arising from these developments and what could be done to mitigate the risks.

This event brings together Professor Pippa Norris and Professor John Keane to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Professor Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Professor John Keane will discuss his new book When trees fall, monkeys scatter.

The Speakers:

Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Pippa is a comparative political scientist who has taught at Harvard for more than a quarter century. She is ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, the Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and Director of the Electoral Integrity Project. Her research compares public opinion and elections, political institutions and cultures, gender politics, and political communications in many countries worldwide. She is ranked the 4th most cited political scientist worldwide, according to Google scholar. Major honors include, amongst others, the Skytte prize, the Karl Deutsch award, and the Sir Isaiah Berlin award. Her current work focuses on a major research project, www.electoralintegrityproject.com, established in 2012 and also a new book with Ronald Inglehart “Cultural Backlash” analyzing support for populist-authoritarianism.

John Keane will discuss his new book When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: rethinking democracy in China. He is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), and Distinguished Professor at Peking University. He is renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy. He is the Director and co-founder of the Sydney Democracy Network. He has contributed to The New York Times, Al Jazeera, the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Harper’s, the South China Morning Post and The Huffington Post. His online column ‘Democracy field notes’ appears regularly in the London, Cambridge- and Melbourne­-based The Conversation. Among his best-known books are the best-selling Tom Paine: A political life (1995), Violence and Democracy (2004), Democracy and MediaDecadence (2013) and the highly acclaimed full-scale history of democracy, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009). His most recent books are A Short History of the Future of Elections (2016) and When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter (2017), and he is now completing a new book on the global spread of despotism.

Event Details

Speaker: Professor Gerry Stoker, University of Southampton
Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this

Event Details

Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this seminar Gerry Stoker explains how and why anti-political sentiment has grown among British citizens over the last half-century drawing on research about to be published in a Cambridge University Press book co-authored with Nick Clarke, Will Jennings and Jonathan Moss. The book offers a range of conceptual developments to help explore how citizens think about politics and the issue of negativity towards politics and uses responses to public opinion surveys alongside a unique data source-the diaries, reports and letters collected by Mass Observation. The book reveals that anti-politics has grown in scope and intensity when seen through the lens of a long view of the issue stretching back over multiple decades. Such growth is explained by citizens’ changing images of ‘the good politician’ and changing modes of political interaction between politicians and citizens. The seminar will conclude by placing these findings in a broader comparative context and exploring the implications for efforts to reform and improve democratic politics.

Chair: Dr Thomas Wynter

Discussant: Professor Ariadne Vromen

Time

(Tuesday) 11:45 am - 1:30 pm

Location

Room 276

Merewether Building, University of Sydney http://sydney.edu.au/arts/about/maps.shtml?locationID=[[H04]]

Event Details

Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against

Event Details

Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in northern Rakhine State causing more than 650,000 Rohingyas to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous “war on drugs” has claimed more than 12,000 victims, predominantly the urban poor, including children. And the Cambodian government’s broad political crackdown in 2017 targeting the political opposition, independent media and human rights groups has effectively extinguished the country’s flickering democratic system at the expense of basic rights.

Australia’s 2017 White Paper includes the goals of “promoting an open, inclusive and prosperous Indo–Pacific region in which the rights of all states are respected” as well as the need to protect and promote the international rules based order. So what role does Australia play in addressing these problems and what more could the Australian government be doing?

To discuss these matters, we are delighted to welcome Elaine Pearson.

Elaine Pearson is the Australia Director at Human Rights Watch. Based in Sydney, she works to influence Australian foreign and domestic policies in order to give them a human rights dimension. She regularly briefs journalists, politicians and government officials, appears on television and radio programs, testifies before parliamentary committees and speaks at public events. She is an adjunct lecturer in law at the University of New South Wales. From 2007 to 2012 she was the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division based in New York.

Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Elaine worked for the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kathmandu and London. She is an expert on migration and human trafficking issues and sits on the board of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. Pearson holds degrees in law and arts from Australia’s Murdoch University and obtained her Master’s degree in public policy at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

She writes frequently for publications including Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal.

Event Details

Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way

Event Details

Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way they emerge out of ecclesiastical institutions and practices. However, I will suggest that Foucault’s contribution to political theology in a sense turns the paradigm on its head and signals a radical departure from the Schmittian model.

Foucault does not seek to sanctify power and authority in modernity, but rather to disrupt their functioning and consistency by identifying their hidden origins, unmasking their contingency and indeterminacy, and bringing before our gaze historical alternatives. Furthermore, Foucault introduces to the debate around political theology something that was entirely missing from it – the idea of the subject. The notion of the ‘confessing subject’ – the individual who, from earliest Christian times, has been taught to confess his secrets and thus form a truth about himself – is central to Foucault’s concerns, as are the ethical strategies through which the subject might constitute himself in alternative ways that allow a greater degree of autonomy. And while in the past, religious institutions and practices, particularly the Christian pastorate, have sought to render the subject obedient and governable, at other times, including in modernity, religious ideas have been a source of disobedience, revolt and what Foucault calls ‘counter-conducts’. It is here that I will develop the idea of ‘political spirituality’, showing how this notion can operate as a radical counter-point to political theology.

About the speaker:

Saul Newman is Professor of Political Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London and currently a Visiting Professor at the Sydney Democracy Network. His research is in continental political thought and contemporary political theory. Mostly known for his research on postanarchism, he also works on questions of sovereignty, human rights, as well as on the thought of the nineteenth century German individualist anarchist, Max Stirner. His most recent work is on political theology and post-secular politics, and he has a new book forthcoming with Polity called Political Theology: a Critical Introduction.

Time

(Thursday) 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Location

Seminar Room 498

Merewether Building, University of Sydney

Organizer

Department of Government and International Relationsmadeleine.pill@sydney.edu.au